Private Hells in Cheap Hotels
by Senri
Summary: Jack and Wuya have a lot of shared history.


The air around Wuya had a recognizable quality which Jack had learned young. Put simply, the witch was a creature of fire; so around her the immediate area always seemed colder because she appropriated surrounding heat into her own body, which when one came near radiated heat as though a brazier warmed in her ribcage. It was the frigid air, then, which alerted Jack to her arrival. His cheap hotel room had no air conditioner, and a night in the height of India's summer should never have been so cold.

So he woke, shivering on the bare mattress in his boxers, with Wuya brushing searing fingers on his throat. He looked older than he should have, face thinner than when she'd seen him last, shoulders lean, and she looked the same. Her lips were almost obscenely red, her eyes sea green and spiraling like whirlpools.

He drew back. She smiled, revealing sharp canines.

"Jack," she said. "How clever you've been. You almost got away. But hiding in a cheap room won't save you from me."

"Wuya," he said. He had to work up some spit before talking again. "You fit right in here. Just like the girl I had last night. Only I'm sure she was much better than you'd be."

She really did match the room, with her slitted skirt revealing a flash of slim white thigh, and all her heavy crimson waves of hair. Hot girl. Cold room. Ha. She was just smiling at the insult. Probably knew he had lied. Damn it, he thought. Damn it.

"I'd offer to give you a taste, Jackie boy…" She flicked a finger in the same way a thug would whirl open a butterfly knife, only Wuya seemed somehow awesomely more threatening when she did it. "But you're still just a little brat and I'm not interested." The skin under his chin stung and he knew without looking that a (small) flap of skin now hung loose and bloody on his throat. She lifted her hand carelessly and licked off the bright pearl of blood off her nail.

"You're a fetishist's dream, but that's not the kind of thing I'm into," Jack said. "So how about you skip on out and I'll go find the nice kind of girl I like?"

"The kind that's half-dead, or the kind that's just eleven?" Wuya cooed. "Or the kind that's a Xiaolin Monk? Stop trying to be smart, Jackie boy. You were never good at faking things."

The old nickname made his throat fill with bile, put him back in the days of whiny youth, when he sweated in black pleather and jumped at Chase Young's beck and call. At Wuya's too.

"What are you doing here?" he asked. Cut to the chase. Cut to the Chase Young. Aha ha ha. Get the shit over with. Her smile was slow and awful. He flinched just barely.

"It's been such a long time, Jackie boy," she said, leaning away and crossing her slim white ankles. "Can't I check up on you? See what you've got your pecker in now? Make sure you're not taking time with the wrong kind of people?"

That was what this was about – compulsively he thought of Raimundo's tired face, Kimiko's dirty braided hair, Omi's restless juddering energy grinding itself to powder from inaction. The white knights fled into hiding from the cataclysm. No, they were his and not hers, and he wouldn't give them up – them, who had trusted him because they had to, because there wasn't anyone else.

"You softened up quickly when we started to win," Wuya said sweetly. _(All those frightened people dying.)_ "Couldn't get it up when the game got rough, Jackie boy?"

A game. That was of course what it was to her. Just another puzzle box, one that she could break this time. He'd thought the Xiaolin's charms and his own technology could keep him safe from the Heylin, but that was foolish, obviously, naïve, overestimating their powers, underestimating hers, and now Wuya was right here. "I just got bored," he said raspily. "You know with a gang, it's just too easy, and evil boy Jack-o doesn't share his pleasures – "

"Jack, Jack, Jack," she said, brimming with malicious amusement. "Remember your team jackets?"

That was the problem with trying to lie to Wuya – too, too much history.

"I'm my own team now. I'm not working for you or Bean or anyone else – if you want some fun, though, I guess I could be open…" He tried to smile coldly, folded his arms behind his head even through his gut screamed against it. Wuya looked close to laughing.

"Just a lapdog for the Xiaolin has-beens, then? An errand-boy?" she mocked. "You've gone downhill, Jack. At least when you were a child you pretended to be in charge."

Jack sat up, slid to the edge of his mattress, and turned his back on her – if she decided to attack he'd be immolated whether he saw her coming or not. _But she's not going to really go for you, right, Jackie boy? She's here for another reason, and no, it's not because of your manly charms._

"I'm not telling you where they are," he said, imagining it might change things, that the games might end. The truth was he didn't exactly know where they were but he could find them – "We'll leave clues," Raimundo had said. "If you run into trouble you should bring it along to us, man. We'll deal with it."

The problem was he didn't think they could deal with this kind of firepower – no pun intended. Wuya strong from drinking souls. She sucked them down like a skinny teenage boy gulping milkshakes. He tried to picture Omi standing against her and his mental image dissolved into a wash of salt water and steam. The little monk who believed in him would be cooked like a lobster in its shell, elemental advantage or no.

"You will," Wuya said, sounding smug. "Because you haven't changed, Jackie boy. You're still the scrawny little weed who licked Chase's boots whenever he glanced at you. And if you won't – "

Heat shimmered off her body at an alarming magnitude. Sun on a jagged lava field, toad cooking on black pavement, the space just above the sun –

He seemed to smell smoke.

"If you won't, I'll make you."

(All those frightened people running with dirty faces, all those people who wouldn't keep their heads down, all those people that the monks couldn't protect. They died in packs, in fire, yowling, and afterwards the world was a different place.)

He blinked. Wuya was in front of him, her sharp nails touching his face just in front of his ears. It was impossible to look away from her eyes, their slowly-spinning depth, their sun-dappled green. Soft breath brushed his face. She released him suddenly.

Jack held his breath, felt a new weight settle on his heart and lungs like sandbags. A geas? Or something like. He thought those were Welsh-Irish-something… whatever. A call. A command. Did its name matter?

"See, Jack," Wuya crooned. "You're a peon but you've got a bit of brain. Think about putting it to use for us."

She stood up and backed off, with a smile which suggested that she'd love the chance to burn a lesson into him. With perfect posture and her hair billowing in a red sheet she glided out of the room into the dingy hall, and the cold went with her. He was sure she was gone before the door clicked shut, and reflexively he stood to chain the door and click the deadbolt home.

This was his life: bare, stained mattresses, one after another, rooms with barred windows, sinks from which only cold red water ran. Jack glanced around, ran his hands compulsively through his greasy red hair until it stood up in clumps, felt a hot tide of bile flood his stomach and chest with bitter heat. This was the world of every regular person now, this blinkered misery, the life lived at a mercy to any rough guy with a little more muscle, but it didn't have to be his world. The call sat in his brain stem, nodes spreading through his blood, want yanking just above his heart.

This was the world now, but it didn't have to be _his_ world.

He could go to the sea and wash away the urge for a while. He could cripple himself protecting people who were each other's friends but never really his. Or… the Xiaolin had left him a trail. Wuya had kindled a call in him and left it burning.

It heated the marrow in his bones, matched sweaty, humid warmth that blanketed his room, warmed him up until he seemed to blend into the surrounding air. It seemed almost paltry, still, and in the distance he felt the germination of an idea that he could not name.


End file.
